Theophostic Prayer Ministry (formerly Theophostic counseling) was developed in the United States during the mid-1990s by Ed Smith, a Baptist minister.
Its name comes from the Greek theo (God) and quasi-Greek phostic (light), and it is often associated with the Christian Inner Healing Movement. Smith says people are being delivered from phobias, depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive–compulsive disorder, dissociative personality disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, sexual addiction, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and homosexuality through Theophostic principles. The name Theophostic is a registered trademark.
Few empirical evaluations of Theophostic ministry are available, although Christian psychologist Fernando Garzon says that current case study and survey data has yielded clinically significant changes in client symptom levels, and high degrees of client and practitioner satisfaction.
Definition
Smith's definition of Theophostic Prayer Ministry is that "Theophostic is a ministry of helping emotionally wounded people to acknowledge and to identify the true source of their inner emotional pain and find lasting peace through receiving personalized truth directly from the Lord."
The Theophostic Prayer Ministry process
Participants in a typical Theophostic Prayer Ministry session are the ministry recipient, a ministry facilitator and optionally a prayer partner.
The ministry facilitator ensures that the ministry recipient understands the process before the session begins.
The facilitator begins the session with a prayer of encouragement.
The ministry recipient closes their eyes and concentrates on feeling the emotional pain from which they are seeking relief. The purpose of focusing on the emotion is to allow their mind to drift back to a related memory. That memory is of a situation that the recipient regards as painful and which they have interpreted to form a belief about themself or their situation. The event that is contained in the memory may have occurred many years ago, for example in the person's childhood. The emotion provides a bridge to the belief.<ref>Smith, Edward M. (2007). Theophostic Prayer Ministry, Basic Training Seminar 2007, DVD Sessions, Disk 1, New Creation Publishing.</ref>
The ministry recipient describes the memory to the facilitator. The facilitator asks the recipient some questions that will enable the recipient to drill down to the core belief housed in this memory that is troubling them. The questions are not leading questions, as the facilitator does not assume anything about the memory's content. Rather they are open questions, posed to help the recipient himself to identify the core belief. This core belief is known in TPM parlance as a "lie" that causes lie-based pain. The lie arises from the recipient's interpretation of the situation. For example, a rape victim may have formed a belief that they are dirty or shameful, whereas they were actually an innocent victim. Though their belief is false, it has the same impact on their emotional state now as if it were true.
Once the recipient has identified the core troublesome belief, the facilitator prays, asking Jesus to provide the recipient with his perspective, that is, what he would like the recipient to know. According to TPM, Jesus answers that prayer in various ways. Jesus might provide his truth to the recipient by means of a mental picture, a feeling, a scripture, a word, a realization, or some other way. The truth received from Jesus replaces the painful lie previously believed, and the result is peace.Garzon 2008, p. 77
TPM says that every person believes not just one but many lies of the kind that lead to present emotional pain. Each lie can be eliminated with the same process.
Research
In his 2008 book, Fernando Garzon, an associate professor in the Center for Counselling and Family Studies at Liberty University, describes his team's two-year-long outcomes-based case study research project that evaluated TPM. The research team found very clear preliminary results that showed a correlation between TPM treatment and symptom reductions. Garzon wrote that the case studies strongly support the need for randomized comparative or control group studies.